Happy days with Gordon Brown

The great thing about the Leveson inquiry is that every so often it offers us the opportunity for that most lovely and undervalued of sensations, nostalgia. I hope that you, like me, revelled in that strange Scottish man’s performance yesterday — the man who, incredibly, used to be in charge of us all. It took me back on a wave of nostalgia to the damp summer of 2009, when we were governed by the closest this country ever gets to one of those dictators from the ‘stans. Not so much in the lack of democracy and political prisoners being tortured — Brown’s shadowy cabal stuck the knife in to those who had displeased them with greater subtlety than you would have got from the likes of Nazerbayev, although to no less effect.

I meant really in the extraordinary, closeted, feverish, seething and deluded paranoia of the chap. There was one moment at Leveson where he did that truly scary mirthless laugh, the mouth wide open in a smile, the eyes full of venom. How did he become Prime Minister? It sort of beggars belief.

And did you believe him, about his conversation with Rupert Murdoch? It is an incredible thing that despite the national vilification of Murdoch And All His Works, most commentators seemed inclined to believe the Australian tycoon, rather than the former Prime Minister.